Jean Rhys’s Environmental Language: Oppositions, Dialogues and Silences

Postcolonial ecocriticism is a new and rapidly growing field, characterized by a consciousness of the simultaneous depredation of subordinated people and land both during and after formal colonialism (see Huggin and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 2010; eds. Deloughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, 2011). Rhys is somewhat of a complicated case with regard to placement in colonial and postcolonial contexts, coming as she did from the plantocracy in Dominica, but living most of her adult life in economically straitened circumstances in Britain. In Rhys’s fictional world, nature is not a benevolent being or attractive ornament. It often aids and abets amoral power, but also when given the chance to escape the particularly British desire to turn wilderness into dependent, subservient gardens, nature can become a kind of parallel to Rhys’s anarchistic (if often outgunned and outlawed) protagonists. Rhys’s awareness of power disparities extends to her awareness of environment, and reading her work through the lens of ecocriticism allows us to see this clearly.